


First Blood

by PaperCrease



Category: One Step From Eden
Genre: Artistic Liberties, Gen, I tried ok, fight scene story, oops big angst edition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 14:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21180776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperCrease/pseuds/PaperCrease
Summary: Saffron knew she'd enter combat with another human being sooner or later. If she managed to survive the apocalypse- one of her making, she's almost sure- she couldn't have been the only one.Winning in combat is easy. The guilt is not.





	First Blood

Saffron has a long way before Eden, if it remained through the apocalypse.

Her spells, she's pretty sure they are- her spells are out there. Not just out in the wild, but in the hands of someone dangerous. She recognized her own spell matrixes mixed among others up in the sky, from the recordings of when it lit up, just before a rain of spells of all kinds wreaked havoc across the world...

Most of the world. Possibly excluding Eden, if the signals she caught were real.

Even if Eden didn't remain, it had to have something left- the world's most technologically advanced and magically attuned city's ruins- she didn't want to think about that, but- scavengers couldn't have stripped it all to the bone just yet.

So Saffron trudged on, approaching the end of the arctic zone. She could see the jungle, not too far in the distance. For a little bit it was getting warmer, but quickly became cold again and colder yet, as though to taunt her, her breath becoming harshly visible when it hadn't been more than a light puff before.

Saffron takes a second to think about that, and realizes it shouldn't be anywhere near that cold, this close to the edge of this area.

She turns around, and sure enough, she has company. Not just some lurker or hailcaster, though- a teen girl with blue hair and a red cape trailing behind her. The blue-haired girl turns around- she's wearing shorts and a hoodie. Despite the scuffs on her clothes and the dirt in her hair and on her skin, and the errant traces of blood... This outfit is somehow familiar.

Saffron notices as her soon-to-be opponent pulls spells out from the hoodie's pockets that the veins of this girl's arms are a rather bright blue. A thin layer of ice forms, traced along the blue veins as they begin to glow, and Saffron can feel the cold seeping through her own blood.

A girl's voice comes across, the slightest hint of shakiness attempting to hide behind what was surely experience. "Would you like to be diced? Or julienned?"

She remembers where she saw this girl before. Much less hostile and much more hopeful, at the time- A commission she did in that custom spell shop she first worked at, far before she ended up signing contracts with the government. She faintly recalls the girl's name after a moment- Selicy.

Saffron does not have to try to remember what spell she made, though- Selicy does the job for her, ice pricking at her arm and leaving it tingling in cold-dulled pain, snapping her out of the memory as she avoids the Ice Needle's return trip. The cold energy lingers around her, threatening to flash freeze her if she lets herself get hit again.

Selicy charges forward, attempting to run Saffron through with some sort of frost-based wand that forms into a dagger of ice. Neither this nor her second charge successfully hit- her following swings aren't exactly expected, but they're not very fast either, and Saffron easily maneuvers forward past her then backwards past her again when Selicy tries to correct herself.

The moment Selicy stops, she fires Kinetic Wave, knocking her flat and shoving her backwards. Thunder and Mini-Thunder are both primed to fire, nailing the target, and after all of it an Icebolt thuds into the girl's shoulder as well. Despite her apparent preference for the cold, Saffron notes that it's primed to do just as much damage to Selicy as it would to herself. She presses a button, her 'wand'- a tiny gadget, in this case appropriately wand-shaped and convenient for quick field tests- lets out a click as it reloads the spellcards.

Selicy's had enough time to breath now, despite getting hit by spell after spell as she recovered. She tries for something similar, charging in to try to stab Saffron again. Saffron hears a spell launch something behind her, before Selicy tries to stab her again, though Saffron has no trouble sidestepping her stabs now. She looks up and sees a volatile blue ball of mana midair- Zenith, she recognizes- and opts to dodge backwards across its path. Selicy charges forwards with slashes once again, but hits nothing but air and has her own Zenith collide against her back.

The explosion knocks her down, and Saffron has no difficulty in repeating her spell combo process, this time drawing a different spell at the front rather than at the end, Kinetic Wave now shoving Selicy into an Ember before the Thunder and Mini-Thunder strike. She's just barely out of mana, and her Icebolt comes late, missing Selicy who'd managed to throw herself out of the way.

She's getting slower, Saffron notices, her injuries wearing her out. Selicy's probably noticed as well, having stopped dashing around so much, instead surrounding Saffron with hovering icicles. They follow just behind her movements, but they shake before they fly at her and Selicy only seems to be able to launch one at a time. Saffron steps out of the way of all of them- she thinks, the last one catching her in the back of her shoulder. The cold energy surrounding her from her earlier mistakes builds up too high, and crashes down onto Saffron, as though dousing her in liquid nitrogen. She flinches from pain but does not let it stop her- she can at least get another Icebolt and Thunder on Selicy, but doesn't bother with the rest of it, reloading and saving her mana for a more opportune moment.

Selicy tries to surround Saffron with icicles again, and this time Saffron is ready to punish her. She casts kinetic wave and dodges an icicle from her left. The one in front of her is shaking, so she steps to her right- the one to her right has remained still, so she steps to her left, the icicle from behind her being no threat as it fails to move with her. She casts Thunder and Mini-Thunder, then steps forward out of the way of the last icicle and casts a Frostbolt of her own.

The frost Saffron had been dealing to Selicy had finally built up, crashing around her and crushing her. It's too much for Selicy to take at this point- her legs give out and she drops forwards. She manages to catch herself on her left knee and tries to use her arms to support herself, but they're not in any better shape than her legs. She falls onto her right, curling up instinctively, as much as her battered body will allow. "It's... so cold..."

Saffron remembers, suddenly, that she's not testing spells with and against her coworkers, but instead in the remains of an apocalypse, fighting some girl who lived through a calamity of her making. Maybe Selicy attacked first, but Saffron knows chaos erupted once the world started to fall apart under wave after wave of destruction rained upon the world.

She knows that people had begun turning on each other the moment they realized their society wasn't coming back- she knows that Selicy was someone else before she was in this chaos, before she learned to deal death before it could be dealt to her, before Saffron covered her in burns and bruises that brought her to death's door.

This is her fault.

She walks to the girl- the child, because that's evidently what she is, tearing scraps from the already torn up labcoat, and bandages Selicy to the best of her ability. Selicy barely registers that anything is happening, but her fingers try to cling to the warmth she feels.

Saffron lets her hold on for now, and finds something from her pockets. A small notepad, with scraps of ideas that she was no longer sure she ever wanted to pursue again. Good. She pulls out a spellcard too- Ember- and activates it one last time upon her notes, then tosses the spellcard itself onto the gentle flame.

She sits there a little while longer, making sure Selicy is recovering and drawing in some of the warmth from the campfire herself before she ventures to cross the edge of the arctic zone.

Right now, how much of this is her fault isn't her concern- she can't afford to let it be, not when it was only going to get harder to survive, let alone make it to Eden- if it truly still stood.

Whoever took her spells, whoever it was that destroyed the world- she has to find them and make sure they could never do this again.

**Author's Note:**

> written for the osfe short story contest hosted by winter
> 
> the more i realized i didn't have canon to work off of, the more combat i wrote, until i realized i would have to scrap a page of combat writing because it didn't actually add anything of substance.  
i put down things that sounded like they might fit together until i had a theme, and i guess angst happened.  
i kinda am an amateur who has never planned (or written). this isn't particularly cohesive and i think it shows, but. hopefully it was worth reading.
> 
> i took some artistic liberties with the combat, to make it more varied in text format and to provide something you couldn't get from just playing the game (though i suppose this story also relies on the reader having played the game). i mixed selicy's starting deck into her boss moveset. they also have lower health conveniently so it (hopefully) didn't last too long. saffron knowing what she's doing helps.  
saffron just kinda picked up mana veins for the first world, and obviously her deck is frostbolt, thunder, mini-thunder, kinetic wave, and ember. she removed stepslash. selicy was using ice needle and zenith obviously, she's removed the other two. the move where she charges forward is her wand, snowpiercer. she also picked up a mana vein and cold-blooded (enemies start with a stack of frost), hence the ice along her glowing veins and why she only seemed to need to apply frost to saffron twice in order for it to proc. the campfire was an impromptu thing that came from selicy's line about it being cold as well as justifying how they both got healed when selicy is down for the count and in no shape to do anything besides be unconscious and become not unconscious later.
> 
> i think i am rambling. i hope that that's fine or at least that it doesn't count against me or irritate anyone.  
i did enjoy trying to write for the first (maybe also last) time, at least, even if i caused myself a lot of stress with bad habits. thank you for reading!


End file.
